Trump's Indictment and 2024

I can't see Trump winning the general in 2024. Voters will pick the least worst candidate if there's going to be a rematch of 2020, and while both Biden and Trump are very bad, respondents saw trump was the worst of the worst.

But if Trump is somehow --- only God knows --- reelected to the Oval Office, it will be both a political and legal victory. Team Trump has a plan to dismantle the deep state and streamline power in the hands of the executive. That would be really something to behold. 

We'll see, of course.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, "Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury":

Donald J. Trump has long understood the stakes in the election: The courts may decide his cases, but only voters can decide whether to return him to power.

The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election ensures that a federal jury will determine whether he is held accountable for his elaborate, drawn-out and unprecedented attempt to negate a vote of the American people and cling to power.

But it is tens of millions of voters who may deliver the ultimate verdict.

For months now, as prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him in multiple jurisdictions, Mr. Trump has intertwined his legal defenses with his electoral arguments. He has called on Republicans to rally behind him to send a message to prosecutors. He has made clear that if he recaptures the White House, he will use his powers to ensure his personal freedom by shutting down prosecutions still underway.

In effect, he is both running for president and trying to outrun the law enforcement officials seeking to convict him.

That dynamic has transformed the stakes of this election in ways that may not always be clear. Behind the debates over inflation, “wokeness” and the border, the 2024 election is at its core about the fundamental tenets of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the nation’s justice system, the meaning of political free speech and the principle that no one is above the law.

Now, the voters become the jury.

Mr. Trump has always understood this. When he ran for president the first time, he channeled the economic, racial and social resentments of his voters. But as his legal peril has grown, he has focused on his own grievances and projected them onto his supporters.

“If these illegal persecutions succeed, if they’re allowed to set fire to the law, then it will not stop with me. Their grip will close even tighter around YOU,” Mr. Trump wrote to supporters on Tuesday night. “It’s not just my freedom on the line, but yours as well — and I will NEVER let them take it from you.”

Mr. Trump’s arguments have so far been effective in his pursuit of his party’s nomination. After two previous indictments — over hush-money payments to a porn star and purloined classified documents — Republican voters rallied behind the former president with an outpouring of support and cash.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week found that Mr. Trump has a commanding lead over all his Republican rivals combined, leading Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by a two-to-one margin in a theoretical head-to-head matchup. Mr. Trump, even as America’s best-known criminal defendant, is in a dead heat with Mr. Biden among general election voters, the poll found.

About 17 percent of voters who said they preferred him over Mr. Biden supported Mr. Trump despite believing that he had committed serious federal crimes or that he had threatened democracy after the 2020 election.

The prevailing Republican view is that the charges against Mr. Trump are a political vendetta.

Republicans have spent two years rewriting the narrative of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, reimagining the violent attempt to disrupt the Electoral College vote count as a freedom fight against a Washington “deep state.” The result is that in many quarters of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is more trusted than the prosecutors, special counsels and judges handling the cases against him.

“Even those who were fence sitting or window shopping, many of them are of the belief that the justice system under President Biden is simply out to get the former president,” said Jimmy Centers, a former aide to former Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, a Republican who later served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China. “It has only strengthened his support in Iowa, to the point at which his floor is much more solid than what it was earlier this spring.”

Whether Republicans continue to stand by Mr. Trump, as they have for months, remains to be seen in the wake of Tuesday’s indictment.

“At a certain point, are you really going to hitch your whole party to a guy who is just trying to stay out of jail?” asked former Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who lost her seat when suburban voters turned against Mr. Trump in 2018. “There may be another strategy that Republicans could come up with. And if they can’t, I think they lose.”

Strategists supporting rivals of Mr. Trump say that over time, the continued charges could hurt his standing with Republican voters, distract Mr. Trump from focusing on presenting his plans for the future and raise questions about his electability in the general election.

“Even though people will rally around him in the moment, it starts to erode favorablity and his market share,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. “More people will start to look forward.”

Or they may not...

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It

At Amazon, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year.

The Radical Strategy Behind Trump's Promise to 'Go After' Biden

At the New York Times, "Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president":

When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”

Mr. Trump’s message was that the Justice Department charged him only because he is Mr. Biden’s political opponent, so he would invert that supposed politicization. In reality, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, two Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and the financial dealings of his son, Hunter.

But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.

The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

Two of the most important figures in this effort work at the same Washington-based organization, the Center for Renewing America: Jeffrey B. Clark and Russell T. Vought. During the Trump presidency, Mr. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Clark, who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil and environmental divisions, was the only senior official at the department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump wanted to make Mr. Clark attorney general during his final days in office but stopped after the senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse. Mr. Clark is now a figure in one of the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency. They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Mr. Clark, who is a favorite of Mr. Trump’s and is likely to be in contention for a senior Justice Department position if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2024, wrote a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” that will most likely serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

There are debates among conservatives about how far to push that doctrine — and whether some agencies should be allowed to operate independently — but Mr. Clark takes a maximalist view. Mr. Trump does, too, though he’s never been caught reading the Federalist Papers...

As E. Jean Carroll Case Proceeds, Donald Trump Is Riding High in the Polls

Heh.

I love it. 

At the New York Times, "Rape Case Places Trump in Legal Jeopardy. Politically, He’s Thriving":

The former president’s new campaign is rolling unimpeded under the spotlights. In quiet courtrooms, he faces more serious threats.

During E. Jean Carroll’s first day on the witness stand, her lawyer asked what had brought her to a federal courtroom in Manhattan.

“I am here because Donald Trump raped me and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” Ms. Carroll replied. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.”

A day later, Mr. Trump, who has denied the attack and called Ms. Carroll a liar, campaigned in New Hampshire, joking to a crowd about his changing nicknames for Hillary Clinton and President Biden. He did not mention Ms. Carroll’s testimony, or the civil trial going on 250 miles away. But he remarked cheerfully on a poll released that day, which showed him far and away leading the 2024 Republican primary field.

Since Mr. Trump was indicted last month in a criminal case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, his legal travails and his third presidential campaign have played out on a split screen. The courtroom dramas have taken place without news cameras present, even as the race has returned Mr. Trump to the spotlight that briefly dimmed after he left the Oval Office.

Mike Murphy, a Republican political strategist who advised John McCain and Jeb Bush, said that trials and investigations of Mr. Trump often create “a psychological roller coaster for Trump-hating Democrats,” giving them hope that he will be taken down, only to leave them disappointed. Mr. Trump’s legal problems have yet to create significant political problems given the unflinching loyalty of his core supporters.

Since Mr. Trump was indicted, his poll numbers have risen. Criminal investigations against him, in Georgia and Washington, as well as Ms. Carroll’s trial and a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general’s office, have done little to hamper him with his supporters. The poll he mentioned Thursday predicted that he would receive 62 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. His closest opponent, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not yet declared that he is running, was polling at 16 percent.

But the investigations could cause Mr. Trump real harm. If he is convicted in Manhattan, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, he could face up to four years in prison. Criminal charges in Georgia and Washington could come with steeper punishments. And the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against him — which accused him of deceiving lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets — could exact a heavy financial toll.

No matter the outcome, any direct connection between Mr. Trump’s legal fate in the rape case and his political fortunes is tenuous. But Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have reshaped a political bombshell from 2016 into a potent legal weapon: They plan to use the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Mr. Trump boasts about grabbing women by the genitals as the basis for a compelling story about a self-styled playboy man-about-town whose modus operandi was assaulting women.

Mr. Trump said on the tape that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” When the comments became public during the 2016 election, Mr. Trump characterized them as “locker room banter” and after his victory, they became an example of his apparent immunity to scandal.

In the courtroom, which Mr. Trump has avoided, Ms. Carroll’s team argued that his words were not to be dismissed, even years after they became public...

 

Another Biden-Trump Presidential Race in 2024 Looks More Likely

And there's been so much hope for DeSantis too. 

But this does seem about right.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Biden’s impending campaign entry and Trump’s lead in Republican field mean they could square off again":

WASHINGTON — America could be headed for an epic rematch.

President Biden is expected to announce his re-election campaign this week, putting to rest questions of whether he will seek a second term as the nation’s first octogenarian president. At the same time, polls show former President Donald Trump with a substantial lead in the Republican presidential field despite facing criminal charges in New York and the potential for more legal problems on the horizon.

While the race for the White House remains in an early stage and presidential campaigns can shift quickly, the start of the 2024 cycle shows that a rematch between Messrs. Biden and Trump is a distinct possibility, one that would play out before a divided nation as the two parties uneasily share control of the levers of power in Washington.

A second showdown, this time with Mr. Biden in the White House and Mr. Trump as the outsider, could determine how the U.S. proceeds in its support for Ukraine’s war against Russia and its work to counter the effects of climate change, as well as how it would balance domestic and military spending and economic policies at a time of high inflation.

A 2024 campaign would likely be different from the first encounter, when Mr. Biden limited his in-person campaign events and rallies because of the Covid-19 pandemic and Mr. Trump used the trappings of the White House in his campaign, often featuring Air Force One in the backdrop of airport rallies.

Mr. Biden is expected to open his re-election bid with a video announcement. Advisers are considering a Tuesday launch to coincide with the fourth anniversary of his entry into the Democratic primaries in 2019. Mr. Biden is scheduled to address the North America’s Building Trades Unions that day, allowing him to highlight his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law before an audience of union members who have backed both Democrats and Republicans in the past.

Mr. Trump is planning a response to the announcement, aides said, and he has said the president is vulnerable on a range of issues, from immigration to inflation.

Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump three years ago in an election marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and heated protests over police tactics and racial justice. Since then, the aftermath of the 2020 election has lingered over the nation’s politics, with Mr. Trump facing investigations into his attempts to overturn his defeat, the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by his supporters and the former president’s storage of sensitive government documents at his residence and club in Florida.

Mr. Biden faces an investigation into his own handling of sensitive documents after his time as vice president, while his son, Hunter Biden, is facing a criminal investigation related to his taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a gun purchase.

“Our politics have only gotten more divided since Election Day 2020, as we saw most graphically on Jan. 6,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist. “Add to that we’ve never had an indicted nominee, nor potentially, a son of the incumbent president indicted, and thoughts of a high-road election on issues are foolish to the extreme.”

A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found Mr. Biden at 48% and Mr. Trump at 45% in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, a lead within the poll’s margin of error. In testing a potential field of 12 competitors for the Republican presidential nomination, the poll found that Mr. Trump had the support of 48% of GOP primary voters, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 24%. No other Republican candidate was in double digits.

While Mr. Biden faces minor opposition in the Democratic primaries, polls show that the public holds deep reservations about his presidency. In the six Wall Street Journal surveys dating to late 2021, an average of 43% of voters have said they approve of Mr. Biden’s job performance, while an average of 48% said they approved of how Mr. Trump handled the job when he was president.

When a Journal poll asked this month about Mr. Biden’s work on eight issue areas, voters rated him more positively than negatively on only one—his handling of Social Security and Medicare. By 22 points, more people disapproved than approved of his handling of the economy, and the gap was 27 points on dealing with inflation, 26 points on border security, and 21 points on fighting crime.

Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and a member of the Democratic National Committee, said that Mr. Trump would seek to make a rematch about retribution and revenge over the 2020 election and that Mr. Biden would be tasked with making the campaign about his agenda and the future...

Still more.

Fox News Defamation Settlement

Is this the big decimation denouement that the left's is jonesin' for? 

There's a lot of churn at Memeorandum, with what looks like is absolute glee at this defeat for Rupert Murdoch.

At the New York Times, "A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie":

Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.

“Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”

The terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before lawyers were expected to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any wrongdoing in its own programming — a point that Dominion was said to have been pressing for.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said it was “hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

The settlement carries an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from the presiding judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, that cast Fox’s programming in exceptionally harsh light.

In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in its assertion that Fox could not claim that its airing of the conspiracy theory — generally relating to the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump votes into Biden votes — fell under a legally protected status of “news gathering” that can shield news organizations when facts are disputed. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”

In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

Through those findings, the judge seriously limited Fox’s ability to argue that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case, the president of the United States, who was the lead clarion for the false Dominion narrative.

In those heady days before the first day of trial, Fox had been indicating that if it were to lose at trial, it would work up an appeal that would, at least partly, argue with those judicial rulings. Now they stand undisputed.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were engaged in an urgent calculus to take the financial hit rather than risk losing at trial.

As so many legal experts before the trial had argued, Dominion had managed to collect an unusual amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew the Dominion election conspiracy theory was pure fantasy. That extended to the network’s highest ranks — right up to Mr. Murdoch himself.

That evidence appeared to bring Dominion close to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” — established when defamatory statements are “made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not.” (That bar, however, is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees in front of a jury.)

“Dominion Voting had elicited much critical evidence that Fox had acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth, which it could have proved to a jury, so the only question remaining would have been damages,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “Trial of the case also might have undermined the reputation of Fox when the evidence was presented in open court.”

It was less surprising that Fox settled than that it did so at such a late stage on Tuesday...

Keep reading. 

Sean Hannity Indicts the Trump Indictment (VIDEO)

Well, it's outrageous.

WATCH:

Biden Administration to Adopt Trump-Era Policy on Those Seeking Asylum in the U.S.

This is actually an amazing story. 

Sometimes policies have path dependence. Earlier policy choices can have powerful effects on what comes later, and in this case, migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. are going to be in for a shock.

At the Los Angeles Times, "News Analysis: Biden’s new asylum proposal could affect the border forever."

Education Issues Vault to Top of the G.O.P.’s Presidential Race

I like it. 

At the New York Times, "Donald Trump and possible rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are making appeals to conservative voters on race and gender issues, but such messages had a mixed record in November’s midterm elections":

With a presidential primary starting to stir, Republicans are returning with force to the education debates that mobilized their staunchest voters during the pandemic and set off a wave of conservative activism around how schools teach about racism in American history and tolerate gender fluidity.

The messaging casts Republicans as defenders of parents who feel that schools have run amok with “wokeness.” Its loudest champion has been Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week scored an apparent victory attacking the College Board’s curriculum on African American studies. Former President Donald J. Trump has sought to catch up with even hotter language, recently threatening “severe consequences” for educators who “suggest to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.”

Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, who has used Twitter to preview her planned presidential campaign announcement this month, recently tweeted “CRT is un-American,” referring to critical race theory.

Yet, in its appeal to voters, culture-war messaging concerning education has a decidedly mixed track record. While some Republicans believe that the issue can win over independents, especially suburban women, the 2022 midterms showed that attacks on school curriculums — specifically on critical race theory and so-called gender ideology — largely were a dud in the general election.

While Mr. DeSantis won re-election handily, many other Republican candidates for governor who raised attacks on schools — against drag queen story hours, for example, or books that examine white privilege — went down in defeat, including in Kansas, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.

Democratic strategists, pointing to the midterm results and to polling, said voters viewed cultural issues in education as far less important than school funding, teacher shortages and school safety.

Even the Republican National Committee advised candidates last year to appeal to swing voters by speaking broadly about parental control and quality schools, not critical race theory, the idea that racism is baked into American institutions.

Still, Mr. Trump, the only declared Republican presidential candidate so far, and potential rivals, are putting cultural fights at the center of their education agendas. Strategists say the push is motivated by evidence that the issues have the power to elicit strong emotions in parents and at least some potential to cut across partisan lines.

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 on a “parents’ rights” platform awakened Republicans to the political potency of education with swing voters. Mr. Youngkin, who remains popular in his state, began an investigation last month of whether Virginia high schools delayed telling some students that they had earned merit awards, which he has called “a maniacal focus” on equal outcomes.

Mr. DeSantis, too, has framed his opposition to progressive values as an attempt to give parents control over what their children are taught.

Last year, he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades.

Democrats decried that and other education policies from the governor as censorship and as attacks on the civil rights of gay and transgender people. Critics called the Florida law “Don’t Say Gay.”

Polling has shown strong support for a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. topics in elementary school. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last year, 70 percent of registered voters nationally opposed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary grades.

“The culture war issues are most potent among Republican primary voters, but that doesn’t mean that an education message can’t be effective with independent voters or the electorate as a whole,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who worked for Mr. DeSantis during his first governor’s race in 2018.

Mr. DeSantis’s approach to education is a far stretch from traditional issues that Republicans used to line up behind, such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers who raise test scores. But it has had an impact...

Donald Trump's 2024 Campaign Is Sputtering Out of the Gate

At Vanity Fair, "'HE IS IN A WEIRD BUNKER'":

Holed up at Mar-a-Lago, and hawking NFTs, Trump has yet to hold a rally since announcing his run. “Money is a real issue,” one source said. Rather than freezing the field, the campaign would now like to see it fill up—the recipe for a 2016 repeat."

 

A Diminished Trump Meets a Damning Narrative

At the New York Times, "Former President Donald Trump’s current woes extend beyond the report by the House Jan. 6 committee, but the case the panel laid out against him further complicates his future":

As the summer and the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearings began, former President Donald J. Trump was still a towering figure in Republican politics, able to pick winners in primary contests and force candidates to submit to a litmus test of denialism about his loss in the 2020 election.

Six months later, Mr. Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape. His fade is partly a function of his own missteps and miscalculations in recent months. But it is also a product of the voluminous evidence assembled by the House committee and its ability to tell the story of his efforts to overturn the election in a compelling and accessible way.

In ways both raw and easily digested, and with an eye for vivid detail, the committee spooled out the episodic narrative of a president who was told repeatedly he had lost and that his claims of fraud were fanciful. But Mr. Trump continued pushing them anyway, plotted to reverse the outcome, stoked the fury of his supporters, summoned them to Washington and then stood by as the violence played out.

It was a turnabout in roles for a president who rose first to prominence and then to the White House on the basis of his feel for how to project himself on television.

Guided by a veteran television executive, the committee sprinkled the story with moments that stayed in the public consciousness, from Mr. Trump throwing his lunch in anger against the wall of the dining room just off the Oval Office to a claim that he lunged at a Secret Service agent driving his car when he was denied his desire to join his supporters at the Capitol.

On Monday — the second anniversary of Mr. Trump’s Twitter post urging his followers to come to Washington to protest his loss, promising it “will be wild!” — the committee wrapped up its case by lending the weight of the House to calls for Mr. Trump to be held criminally liable for his actions and making the case that he should never again be allowed to hold power...

That's what it's all about. That's always been what it's all about. 

 

Ron DeSantis Holds Early Lead Over Donald Trump Among GOP Primary Voters, WSJ Poll Shows (VIDEO)

He's seen on Laura Ingraham's last night, below, and at the Wall Street Journal, "The former president’s standing among Republican voters has fallen after candidates he promoted lost in midterm elections":

Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential 2024 presidential nominee and view him more favorably than they do former President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows.

In a hypothetical contest between the two, Mr. DeSantis beats Mr. Trump, 52% to 38%, among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year.

The poll found that Mr. DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest, with 86% viewing the Florida governor favorably, compared with 74% who hold a favorable view of Mr. Trump. One in 10 likely GOP primary voters said they didn’t know enough about Mr. DeSantis to venture an opinion of him.

Among all registered voters, Mr. DeSantis is viewed favorably by 43%, compared with 36% for the former president. Favorable views of Mr. Trump were the lowest recorded in Journal polling dating to November 2021 and have been pulled down by a decline in positive feelings among Republicans. Since March, his favorable rating among GOP voters has fallen to 74% from 85%, while the share who view him unfavorably has risen to 23% from 13%.

The decline in Mr. Trump’s standing among GOP voters follows midterm election losses that some in the party have attributed to his significant involvement in candidate endorsements and promotion during the primary process.

Democrats had a net gain of two governorships and one Senate seat, while limiting their House losses to single digits, despite high inflation and with an unpopular president leading their party. The result bucked a historical pattern in which the party that holds the White House almost always suffers a double-digit loss of seats in the House during a president’s first term.

Mr. Trump is the only Republican who has announced a 2024 presidential bid, although others are expected to do so in the coming months. If Mr. DeSantis decides to run, aides have said he isn’t likely to announce a White House campaign until after Florida’s legislative session ends in May.

Mr. DeSantis has become a formidable force in politics, winning a second term last month in a landslide—by 19 percentage points—reflecting big gains in support in Florida since his first election, by less than half a percentage point, to the governor’s office in 2018...

 

How Trump and MAGA Allies Are Defending Violent Jan. 6th Rioters

From Amanda Carpenter, at the Bulwark, "He says he’s sticking with them—and he hopes they’ll stick with him."

And from Charles Sykes, yesterday, a humdinger, "So Much #Losing: Down goes Herschel."

Another Post-Election Surprise! Trump Was Not, Repeat Not, Attempting to Sell Nuclear Secrets to Russia, Admit FBI Leakers and Washington Post

At AoSHQ, "Another revelation it's safe to disclose... after the election."

The Normie Center Strikes Back

Do what you will with this.

From Andrew Sullivan, "Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night":

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will.

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will...

 

After Midterm Election Disappointment, GOP Faces Leadership Choices

McConnell might be out.

At WSJ, "Trump is set to launch another presidential bid as party considers McCarthy’s and McConnell’s roles on Capitol Hill":

WASHINGTON—Republicans face a week that will be crucial in deciding the future direction and leadership of the party in the wake of disappointing midterm elections.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to announce another bid for the White House at 9 p.m. Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla. House Republicans are scheduled to vote the same day on whether to choose House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) as their candidate for speaker. Some Senate Republicans are pushing to delay beyond this week a decision on whether to hand Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) another term as their leader.

Those moves will come after elections that many Republicans believed would deliver the party a sizable majority in the House and control of the Senate. Instead, they failed to capture the Senate majority and appear headed for only a slim edge in the House.

Some Republicans contend that Mr. Trump’s influence and endorsement choices cost the party winnable races in key states, partly by repelling some independent voters. Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, a Republican who previously supported Mr. Trump, said on Fox Business that she couldn’t do so again after the midterm results.

“The voters have spoken, and they’ve said that they want a different leader,” she said. “And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage.”

In response, a spokesman for Mr. Trump said: “Winsome Sears rode a wave of President Trump’s voters to election victory in 2021. Her comments are a slap to the face to all of the grass-roots Republicans that worked so hard to get her elected. They won’t forget this, and there will be a reckoning.” ...

A reckoning? Or a crackup? 

Stay tuned. Trump's expected announce his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday.

More at the link.

 

Trumpism Is Toxic

From Tim Alberta, at the Atlantic, "And three other lessons of the midterm elections":

The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

The answer, it turns out, is neither.

As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024...

Still more.

Jeremy W. Peters, How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted

At Amazon, Jeremy W. Peters, Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.

Ron DeSantis Campaign Spot Draws Donald Trump's Ire (VIDEO)

 At the New York Times, "DeSantis Campaign Video Hints at National Aims and Draws Trump’s Ire":

It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media.

Back in April, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, released “Sweet Florida,” a catchy campaign anthem by two current members of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

That song, with lyrics including “You can take it to the bank he don’t care what Brandon thinks at the White House,” served as the walk-on song for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign events but never went viral outside of conservative circles. As of Monday, it has about 328,000 views on YouTube and another 1.1 million on the conservative video platform Rumble.

But while the campaign jingle touted Mr. DeSantis’s record and popularity in Florida, a new video released by his campaign on Friday hints at the governor’s broader national ambitions.

Posted to Twitter by his wife, Casey DeSantis, the 96-second video invokes God 10 times and suggests that Mr. DeSantis was sent by a divine power.

“God made a fighter,” the narrator says. “God said I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, challenge conventional wisdom and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.”

Former President Donald J. Trump, who views Mr. DeSantis as a potential 2024 rival, wasn’t amused. He called the governor “Ron DeSanctimonious” during a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania. Even some of Mr. DeSantis’s Florida allies said privately that the video was a bit much.

The new video, which already has at least 2.5 million views on Twitter, was produced in-house by the DeSantis campaign. It has not been aired on television and there are no plans to use it as a paid advertisement for Mr. DeSantis, but that may not be the point, so long as it spreads on social media.

It is, by far, the biggest viral candidate video of this year’s midterm cycle, but there is not much competition out there...

 

Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man

Pre-order, at Amazon, Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.